


woven in the spaces between your fingertips

by echoesofstardust



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: F/M, Light Bondage, Smut, estranged childhood best friends to rebound fuck buddies to maaaaaaybe they fall in love, hi hello welcome to the fic that might tank my GPA, questionable metaphors about grammatical tenses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:07:26
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25127473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/echoesofstardust/pseuds/echoesofstardust
Summary: She’s about to grab one of the books from the cart except she knocks one of the other books onto the floor. It’s a grammar book, the pages falling open to a passage on the past continuous tense and she thinks,How fitting.
Relationships: Scott Moir/Tessa Virtue
Comments: 62
Kudos: 142





	woven in the spaces between your fingertips

**Author's Note:**

  * For [slitheredherefromeden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/slitheredherefromeden/gifts).



> This fic is humbly dedicated to only_because3, first and foremost as a thank you for all the kind words you’ve ever given me about my writing (your comment on violinist Scott AU I come back to an embarrassing amount of times) and secondly as a thank you for all your incredible writing I’ve had the privilege to read! Hope you like this little piece <3
> 
> To everyone else kind enough to read my writing,
> 
> A confession that this fic was never meant to get written—I wrote an initial outline over an hour’s train ride sometime last year on the notes app of my phone—and I never felt like the right conduit for the story I wanted to tell. Fast forward to my June exam season this year and now I’m wondering if I’m going to develop a habit for stress-writing smut? (Fic writer Tessa AU was also written during an exam season) I remember jotting down scene ideas and wondering if I could pull this off, but the thing I’m grateful to have learned since first writing fic is how to be brave and how to be vulnerable in my writing, and that’s thanks to supportive readers like you. Thank you so much, truly. This fic has undergone too many metamorphoses since that first outline but it’s here! And it’s written, and it’s yours, if you want.
> 
> (Also a head’s up that I’ve included short quotes from the books _A Gentleman in Moscow_ and _The Night Circus_ so there are spoilers-ish.)

“You know you’re just going to be a rebound, right?” 

“I know.”

//

It begins like this: here’s a girl and there’s a boy and they’re sitting on her porch steps, and she’s searching his eyes, searching for any sign that he doesn’t mean what he’s saying.

Or maybe it begins like this: here’s a girl and there’s a boy and they were best friends once, maybe, a long time ago, before something like time drifted them apart, like planks of a ship lost at sea.

Or maybe it begins like this: here’s a girl and there’s a boy and she thinks she loved him once, maybe, a long time ago, with something like innocence because she was a kid and what did she know?

Or maybe it begins like this: here’s a girl and there’s a boy, at seven and nine, and they bump into each other at the playground and decide to be friends. He tells her she’s pretty with owlishly wide eyes, kisses her cheek as he offers her a bunch of dandelions, when they were still flowers back then, and something to wish on.

Here’s a girl and there’s a boy. So.

It doesn’t matter, really, because she knows how this will end: with two hearts broken between them.

//

It’s a blur the first time it happens. 

As soon as she’s closed her front door, she tugs on the front of his shirt so that his lips crash against hers like the waves of the ocean shatter against the sand, giving and taking and adding and breaking. Their teeth knock, like they're teenagers still clumsily learning, when kissing was still exciting and new. His fingers map a gentle path on her chin, on her cheek, but she doesn't want that. She can feel him want to take his time but she doesn't want that. She's not here to be adored. She pulls his hand away from her face, moves it to her hip and molds it so that it grips her tight. He follows her lead, moving his other hand to her other hip, holds on hard enough to leave bruises. She wonders if she'll find them in the morning, like lopsided, misshapen stars. 

She digs her fingers into his hair, tugs on it hard enough that he growls into her mouth, a sound that travels throughout her body and making her shiver. He slots his thigh in between her legs, moving his hands to squeeze her ass. He latches his mouth on her neck, and she feels on every inch of her skin the biting scrape of his teeth. He's caught on quick to how she wants this, hard and messy and a little painful. There’s a gaping hole in her chest, from another boy, another life, and all she wants to do right now is hurt a little longer.

She wraps a leg around his waist, gasping as he grabs her other leg to wrap around him in tandem so that it’s only the pressure from him pressing her against the wall that’s keeping her upright. She clutches onto his bicep, feels the muscle tense and ripple. She grows slick between her thighs at the thought of being taken by him, like this.

“Scott,” she drags out the syllable of his name in a low sigh, as he noses the swell of her breast, licks her through the fabric of her shirt.

“Yeah, T?” he pants. God, that’s a nickname from years back. She doesn’t remember the last time he called her that. Maybe it was during that goodbye, before he drove away in a white, beat-down pick-up truck, and she never really got him back.

“Bed,” she gets out. “Please.”

“Okay.” He looks up at her, apologetic. “But you’ll have to show me the way.”

It startles her that he doesn’t know, but of course, he doesn’t. He hasn’t ever been inside her house. Scott, her childhood best friend Scott, might as well be a stranger compared to the man she’s going to fuck tonight.

“Ye—yeah,” she starts to unwrap her legs from around him but his hands are firm on her legs.

“I can carry you.” 

When he moves away from the wall, she has to wrap her arms around his shoulders to keep her balance, and he shifts her up his torso to hold her better. She bites back a moan when her core drags against his abdomen.

“Your bedroom would be on the west side, yeah? You hate being woken up by the sun.” It’s another thing that startles her and she can only nod.

“Just down this hallway and—” she directs him, as he adjusts his grip so that he can turn the doorknob and kick the door open, “—this is me.”

It hits her that this is a big moment for most people, that bedrooms are sanctuaries and only the most trusted can enter, and she doesn’t know where she and Scott lie on that continuum. She watches him scan it over, lingering on the precarious stack of books on her bedside table. “You haven’t changed.” It’s dark but she can hear his smile.

She wants to disagree. She knows she’s changed and so has he. He’s someone whose name she only knows because their mothers are the kind of friends who regularly catch up for Sunday brunch, whose families are regularly invited to each others’ houses, but it feels too much like she’s on the verge of mourning something so she slants her lips against his instead. He follows her lead, dropping her onto her bed hard enough for the mattress to creak, wasting no time to press his body hard on top of hers.

She yanks at his shirt and he pulls it off, returning the favour by pushing her shirt up past her chest, his mouth hot and intent on every sliver of skin revealed. She lifts herself up to take off her shirt the rest of the way, settles back down with a moan as she closes her eyes. 

"Can I take these off?" His hands splay on each of her hips, sliding along the material of her leggings. He waits until she nods before his hands slip under the waistband of and she lifts her hips up to make it easier for him. 

"Your turn," she tells him with a nip to his neck as she gets on her knees on the bed. She quickly unbuttons his jeans, letting them fall to a crumpled heap. She surges up to kiss him, perhaps a bit too fierce, but he matches her. It's not gentle, and she's thankful for it. She's afraid that gentle is what's going to make her break. 

She scoots back as he gets on her bed, hovering over her, a hand planted on the mattress beside her head, his other making its way up her thigh. She widens her legs, gasping as he roughly pulls her underwear down, then as he touches her in a way that makes her stutter. He could make her come like this, but she wants him to be buried in her, wants the heavy weight of a body on top of hers to make her forget the world for a while.

She circles her hips against his intent hand. "Just want you now, please."

"How do you want me?" He whispers close to her hair. 

She rolls over onto her stomach, tucking her knees under her. 

He traces the divots of her spine in a caress that's too tender than what she wants, but his hands grip her hips again, firm. 

He asks her where she keeps her protection and she directs him to the middle drawer of her left dresser. He moves to the wrong one at first and she almost laughs, but the sound bubbling up her throat feels foreign. 

He holds onto her hair as he positions himself at her entrance. He drags his length along her once, twice, and she stifles a moan when he gets her clit. He starts to fuck her, shallowly at first, and she whimpers at how he stretches her. She twists her hands into her sheets. 

He settles into a steady rhythm, his groans punctuated by the occasional 'fuck'. His body crowds her in and she relishes in every sensation. His solidness on top of her, the heat of his skin, the roughness of his breathing, the way his cock fills her, over and over, just as hard as she wants. 

"Faster," she pants, when she can feel herself on the edge. She brings a hand to her centre, rubbing her clit with short, sure strokes until she comes around him, her shuddering gasps muffled into her sheets. He fucks her through it, just as hard, and he says nothing when he finally comes inside her.

He collapses on his side, bringing her over with him, and she hadn't planned on being held but she gives him this moment. 

(Maybe, the first time wasn't a blur after all, if she can remember it with eidetic clarity.)

//

She wraps her sheets around herself as she watches him get dressed. 

As soon as he’d disentangled himself from her, rolled out of her bed and gone to her ensuite and come out again, he picked up his clothes and slipped them back on. She breathes a sigh of relief that he wasn’t going to ask if he could stay. Once he’s dressed, the only evidence of what they'd been up to was the littering of love bites on his neck, the dishevelled state of his hair and how his lips looked kiss-swollen, even in the dark. 

She opens her mouth. “Um, so—thank you.” She clamps it shut. 

"You’re welcome." His voice is unreadable. There was a time when she would've been able to tell every nuance and inflection, when she would have been able to pick him out from a blurry outline in the dark. 

"Okay. So, I'll—I'll call you?" she winces, pulling the sheets tighter around her. "I should probably grab your number—" she looks around, realising her phone is probably still in her kitchen. 

"You don't have my number anymore?" 

"I have your number from—before. But I assume it's changed?" 

"Not everything's changed." He shrugs. "If you've still got it, it's the same one."

"Okay."

"Okay."

She presses her lips together, before she asks him to stay, stupidly and recklessly. Not to fuck, as good as it had been. But because he was her best friend once, maybe, a long time ago, and she wonders if that Scott is still there somewhere.

He steps closer to her, bends down to kiss her forehead once, gently. She closes her eyes. 

When she opens them, he's gone. 

//

London Public Library might be the place she works, but there is always a sense of coming home whenever she walks in to start her day. 

After her dreams of pursuing ballet were no longer possible after her injuries, she had to think long and hard about what she wanted to do with her life instead. She had always loved reading so she thought of studying English Lit in university. But it wasn’t until she was at the library researching for one of her papers and one of the librarians was taking the time to help her that she thought, _I want to be like that._ She had spent many afternoons in libraries, falling in love with universes and words. It’s not her first dream, but it can be a new dream.

She chose to study Library Science for her Master’s after her undergrad and for the first time in a long time, it felt like she finally had direction.

After she drops her things in her cubicle and opens her laptop, she checks the posted schedule to see what time her desk shift is for today. Not until twelve. The stand-up meeting isn’t until quarter past nine so she takes the time to finish off her coffee. Marie always keeps them brief, luckily.

It’s later during the day as she’s putting away books that have been returned by their patrons that she thinks of Scott.

He had gone away to university on the other side of the country when he was eighteen and she was sixteen and she didn’t know when it was right to text or call him anymore. She saw him in photos, going to all these parties and seeing all these girls. He felt like he was growing up away from her. But she was young and stupid, stressed with all her injuries, and her chest always felt like a tangled ball of string that if she yanked too hard unraveled into something he’d never return. 

So she never did.

She’s about to grab one of the books from the cart except she knocks one of the other books onto the floor. It’s a grammar book, the pages falling open to a passage on the past continuous tense and she thinks, _How fitting._

She took French for an elective and she remembers preferring the term the French used for it: _l’imparfait,_ or the imperfect. If she stares into the distance long enough, she sees her and Scott stuck in the same movie scene.

He was leaving, and she was saying goodbye. He wasn’t calling and she was staring at the phone. She was at the hospital, not saying who she was waiting for.

He never comes and it doesn’t end, like an imperfect, incomplete painting. Something that’s already happened but feels like it never ended.

She squeezes her eyes shut, takes a deep breath, closes the book and puts it back on the cart.

//

The next time she calls him, she opens her door and stares at what he's carrying.

"What's that for?" 

"These—" he lifts up the bags, "—are for you. Well, for us. I figured we could do the whole post-break-up thing of rom-coms and ice-cream?"

It’s a nice gesture, but feels entirely out of place. She stares at him like he’s a character in a novel that’s just done something that’s—well, out of character. "That's not what I need you for," she blurts out, then quickly wants to slap a hand over her mouth. He’s just trying to do a nice thing and she's here implying all she wants is sex. 

To her surprise, he just shakes his head, a small smile teasing the corner of his mouth. "They're not mutually exclusive, you know. I can still take care of you later."

Her cheeks heat, and she steps aside to let him in. She leads him to her kitchen where he starts to unpack all the tubs. Jesus, it's like he's trying to start his own ice-cream bar. 

"Why so many flavours?" 

He scratches the back of his neck. "I don't know what your favourite flavour is anymore. I figured I'd play it safe."

She spies the chocolate fudge brownie one. Memories of eight-year-old, ten-year-old, twelve-year-old her fighting him to always get that flavour assault her—she’d split her lip once after a particularly bad fall—and she freezes. She bypasses it, opening the strawberry tub instead. Her heart races in her chest.

She looks up to see him watching her, but he looks away the moment he sees her watching him. He clears his throat, “So, is it okay for me to put these in your freezer or…?”

“Oh! Yeah, that’s fine.” She picks something off of her robe. “Feel free to...yeah.”

She finds them spoons and once they settle into her couch with _Funny Face_ playing on the TV, they eat from their respective tubs because if they're doing this cliché post-break-up thing, they might as well do it right. 

She'd already done it with Midori and Kaitlyn and a few other close friends but now that Scott’s gone through the effort of doing this nice thing for her, then she’s not gonna be ungrateful. She sticks a scoop of strawberry in her mouth and it’s sweet and nice and all, but she wishes she hadn’t given up on the chocolate fudge brownie one. It would be petty of her to have blatantly ignored it if he had bought it because he remembered it was her favourite flavour from years back, but he couldn’t have. It’s been too long. She doesn’t know how to explain the ice-cold feeling that swept over her at the realisation.

Guilt gnaws at her because, yeah, she probably could’ve tried harder to stay in touch with him when he was off at university and everything turned to shit with her legs, and that’s not something she really wants to acknowledge. She knows she was at fault too, but inside her is nineteen-year-old Tessa, who still blames him a little bit, for not being the one to make the first call.

She focuses on what’s happening on the screen.

“So, um, do you want to talk about it?”

“Hmmm?” She stops mid-way through a spoonful, holding the spoon at a weird angle and some of the ice-cream drips onto the back of her hand.

“About William. About what happened between you and him.”

“Oh, I mean—” she digs into her tub, “—we just—wanted different things, I guess. You know how it goes.”

“I do.”

Oh, that’s right. She’d heard through the grapevine (that is, their mothers) that he’d broken up with his long-term girlfriend about a year or so ago.

“I’m sorry about what happened between you and—” She doesn’t even remember the girl’s name. She's struck by a sense of guilt that she doesn't.

“Yeah, well, it’s been a while now.” He shrugs, a half-smile on his lips. “It does get easier.”

She believes him. She loved William, and it’s painful right now, but she knows she’ll get through it. The storybooks talk of loves so deep and encompassing that they will break and shatter you when they, and she doesn’t know if she’s lucky or unlucky that she’s never experienced that.

She lets the quiet drift over them again.

Once the end credits are rolling, she lets her eyes wander over to him. He’s licking his spoon clean and the sight of him doing that makes her wonder what kinds of wicked things his tongue could do to her body. He catches her looking, and this time, he doesn’t look away. This—lust or desire or whatever else you want to call it—this, she can do. Scott asking about William felt too intimate and close and like her heart will be stripped bare.

(Perhaps the scariest thing will be that a part of her wants to spill like ink on parchment, wants to reach out to him and ask ‘Do I still know you? Do I still know you the way I used to?’

But she’s not doing that. That’s not what they’re here for.)

She sets her partly-eaten tub of ice-cream on her coffee table—the condensation is probably gonna leave marks but with Scott looking at her like this she finds it hard to care. She moves over to his side of the couch, settles on his lap, sighing as his fingers run up and down her sides. His other hand settles high on her thigh, slowly, teasingly moving upward. 

She knows the moment he realises she’s got nothing on underneath her robe, when his hand travels up her inner thigh and finds no fabric in his way.

“You weren’t planning on telling me,” he whispers huskily in her ear, “that while you were sitting right there, you had nothing on underneath this?” He runs his fingers over the fabric of her robe.

“You didn’t ask.” She moans as he ghosts his fingers over her core, too light to really feel anything, as his other hand pulls roughly at the tie at her waist, undoing the knot. He pushes it off her shoulders, letting the fabric crumple at her waist, tugging it completely off of her until she’s bare on top of him. She shivers, her nipples pebbling.

One of his hands stays still at her waist, the other skimming up her back to grip her hair. He tilts her head, exposing her neck, and she closes her eyes as his lips land on her jaw. He mouths down to her neck, across her collarbone, before finally capturing her lips with his. She presses herself fully against him, fingers tangling in his hair, rocking down on his hardness under her. He growls as he holds her hips hard, lifting her up slightly above him.

She whimpers, wanting, needing, something, _anything._ He lets go of her, reaches for his own tub of ice-cream, scoops part of a spoonful and holds the spoon in his hand. “Can I try something?”

She nods, just wanting to feel, and he leaves the tub beside him. There’s an argument to be made about potentially staining her pristine white couch, but it’s no longer a priority when Scott tilts her neck again by the grip he has on her hair, letting the spoon drip ice-cream onto her skin. She tenses at biting cold but he chases it with his tongue and the contrasting heat sets something burning in her. He continues the same path of torture, over and over.

“Lean back for me.” It’s barely over a whisper but the command is clear in his voice. She follows. He scoops another spoonful out of the tub, then carefully paints her nipples. She gasps at the cold, but she knows she’s gotten wetter. He leaves her panting, his free hand running up and down the divot at her spine, looking for all the world like he’s content to just be admiring his handiwork.

“Scott,” she begs. “Please.”

He looks up at her, something dark and hot in the depths of his eyes, before pressing her body closer to his mouth, kissing the curve of her breast. His tongue and his nails are so light, teasing and torturous.

It feels like forever before he latches on her nipple. A guttural groan escapes her lips as he sucks, pulling back to trace circles with his tongue. He moves to her other breast, intent and fervent and so fucking perfect in how he’s playing her body. His hand comes up to play with the breast he’s just left behind, and she loses herself to every single sensation.

His thumb grazes underneath her nipple, a feather-light touch that keeps her on edge. He moans as he tastes the inches of her skin, and the humming vibration just adds to her desire. He varies the pressure, keeping her on edge enough but never leaving her truly satisfied. She’s never felt this wrought and wrung-out by a guy just playing with and sucking on her tits. She’s on her knees with them planted on either side of his lap, bent over him. She wants to grind against something but Scott grips her firmly at the waist, stopping her from grinding against him.

Her hand’s planted on the back of the couch, the other digging into his shoulder. She’s sure she’s dripping down her thighs. She presses her chest closer to his mouth, desperate and heaving, and when he closes his entire mouth around her tit and sucks at the same time as he pinches her other nipple, she seizes up with a soft cry.

Scott lets her go, cradling her (gently, so gently, but she doesn’t notice that, she doesn’t, she doesn’t) as she settles back down in his lap, breathing heavily.

“Did you just—”

“Yeah,” she nods. Her climax was small, took the edge off more than truly satisfying her, but it definitely happened and she’s never gotten off that quickly before.

“Fuck.” He claims her mouth, bites down on her bottom lip. “Fuck, Tessa. That’s—” He groans in between brutal kisses. “I want my mouth on you. Can I do that?”

“Yes,” she whimpers, “yes, please.”

“Okay,” he nods, that determined glint in his eye again. He moves the plastic tub of ice-cream to the coffee table, then twists and lays back with her still on top of him, stretching himself across her couch.

Oh. _Oh._ “C’mon. Move up.” He pats her ass, grinning up at her devilishly. “Want you on my tongue.”

She wants it, wants it, wants it. She’s shaky as she moves up his body, and she’s thankful that he guides her with his hands on her ass. There’s something dirty about doing all this with him still fully clothed and her fully naked, and as she settles over his mouth, he wastes no time showing her exactly what wicked things he can do.

She mewls as he drags his tongue up her folds in stark, bold lines, keens as he traces circles around her clit, the reward all the sweeter when he sucks it hard. She’s grateful for how he’s boxed her in with his arms; otherwise, she’d be falling off her couch. He shifts lower, sliding his tongue in her as he works his nose against her nub.

When she does this rebound thing, she usually doesn’t think too hard about her current partner, too focused on feeling and just forgetting. 

But she can’t help but look down at Scott, and it’s the image of him with his eyes closed, utterly devouring her and looking like that’s all he ever wants to do that tips her over the edge, coming on his hot, wanting, waiting mouth.

She’s boneless as she moves back along him, not really caring that she’s smearing her mess all over his T-shirt. Scott wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. His hands go back to her waist.

“Good?”

She’s still trying to catch her breath so all she gives him is a thumbs up. _Really, Tessa? A thumbs up?_

It doesn’t seem to bother Scott though. His eyes crinkle at the sides and he looks so boyish in that moment.

“Let me take care of you now.” She tries to drop her voice to a husky whisper. She moves back so she can unbutton his jeans. “Take your shirt off.” He does so quickly. She likes that he complies with her demands. He lifts his hips up as she’s yanking his jeans and boxers down, groaning as she wraps her hand around his cock.

She bends to take him in her mouth, wanting the heavy weight, the musk of him, but he stops her short with his hand in her hair. She knows she’s come twice already but the rough pull of his hand just makes her wetter. “Condom. Back pocket of my jeans. Want you to ride me.”

She finds it, tears the packaging rolls it on him. She doesn’t want to face him whenever he fucks her—he feels too close, too vulnerable, too easy to kiss—so she turns around before guiding him to her cunt. He groans deep as she fucks herself down on him slowly, until he’s pushed himself fully in her. His hands grip her hips and she wants to find the mark of him there tomorrow. His thumbs push against the dimples at the bottom of her spine.

She braces herself on his thighs as she rocks back and forth, squeezing him with every drag. She probably won’t come again, but Scott’s taken care of her twice already so it doesn’t bother her. He still feels good, stretching her, filling her up.

“Want you to come again,” he grunts, his fingers finding her clit. He pinches it and she clenches around him, crying out.

“Scott, I—I don’t think I can,” she squeezes her eyes shut. But even as she says it, she feels like she’s dangerously close to the edge.

“You can do it,” he says, softer. “Be good for me? Want you to come, Tess.” He grunts. “For me.”

She keens as she rides him harder, chasing what she wants, what Scott wants. She’s helpless, a slave to the pleasure that Scott’s wrought on her body. When she comes, it starts off somewhere deep within her, overtaking her. She’s barely conscious of when he stills, buried to the hilt, succumbing to his own orgasm.

She’s a sweaty, sated mess when she finds the strength to get off him, pulling her robe off the floor and tying it back around herself with trembling hands. When she looks back at Scott, he’s pulled his jeans back on, still unbuttoned. It should be criminal how good he looks with his hair all mussed like that, sweat still on his collarbone. 

“Can you show me where your trash can is?”

“Yeah, just back in the kitchen.” She gathers up the tubs of ice-cream, spoons still sticking out. Somehow, her couch had managed to survive the mostly unscathed. There’s a couple of drips she should get to as soon as possible because it will set and stain. He follows her and she points to where it is, putting everything else in the sink to clean up later.

She turns around and the same awkwardness from the last time they did this hangs in the air between. She plays with the tie of her robe, coughs once. “So, thank you. For all of that.” 

He shrugs, all nonchalance. “I hope the ice-cream helped.” He smirks.

She huffs out a laugh. “Moir, you know it did. Don’t play coy.”

His grin is far too wide and cheesy. He follows her as she makes her way back to her living room. She picks up his shirt and gives it to him.

As he walks back to his car, she stands in her open doorway. She thinks of the past tense and thinks about how for a lot of verbs it only takes a few changes to make it so.

//

The club is packed when she and some of her work friends decide to let off some steam on a Friday night. The music is loud and the people are louder, the flashing lights way, way too over the top, the drinks definitely overpriced. But it’ll be a good time to let loose, and she’s looking forward to dancing for a night with her friends.

She nearly trips though when she sees Scott at one of the tables, tipping his head back as he’s laughing with his friends. He catches her eye in the next second. He lifts his hand up to wave, and she almost waves back, but second-guesses the gesture because she doesn’t want to make her friends suspicious. There’s no one else that knows of her arrangement with Scott. She gives him a smile instead and hopes that he’s still able to see it.

The girls order a round of shots before they drag her to the dance floor. She loses herself to the beat of the music, giggling along with the rest of her friends over god-knows-what.

“Tess!” Kaitlyn yells in her ear. “It’s been, like, _months_ since William, right? And you still haven’t found a rebound guy yet?” Her friend winks and drapes an arm around her shoulder. “That’s too long, Virtue! You could totally do that tonight.”

“Maybe.” Technically her rebound guy is in here too, anyway.

Too many drinks later, her friends have drifted away to other places and she’s dancing alone when she feels someone approach her. For some stupid reason, for a moment she thinks it’s Scott, expecting to see him when she turns around and opens her eyes. It’s not him. This man, with his dark hair and striking jawline and broad frame, is attractive but the disappointment that sits in the pit of her gut startles her.

“Mind if I join you?”

She doesn’t know what to do with what’s swirling in her stomach on top of the alcohol so she steps in his space, runs her hands up his arms. “Not at all.”

His hands settle heavily on her hips, dangerously close to her ass. She tries to lose herself to the man she’s dancing with but it just feels all wrong. His hands, his height, his smile. The way he holds onto her body is wrong. Her mind wanders back to the many times Scott has now been in her bed, where he’s always known when she wants him to hold on tighter and when she wants him to let go.

“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, stepping away from the guy. “I’m sorry. I can’t, I—” she tries to give him a smile but bolts away before it really forms on her lips.

She goes to the bathroom, fixes her make-up for lack of something else to do, washes her hands.

She feels like she’s about to cry, the pressure behind her eyes and the ache in her throat, but she doesn’t know what about. She pushes the bathroom door open, and she bumps into someone.

“I’m so sor—” she begins, cutting herself off when she realises who it is. “Scott?”

“T,” he sounds so relieved. “Are you okay? I saw you run off. That guy didn’t try to do anything?”

“No.” She hadn’t realised he was watching her. She doesn’t know whether it makes her feel protected or guilty. He looks her over, searches her eyes. “He just—didn’t feel right.” She blinks several times, the lights too bright.

“Okay. Do you want to go home? I can take you. I’ve only had one drink and that was hours ago.”

“Would you?” She doesn’t know if it’s the alcohol but his smile makes her think of the messages people write as inscriptions of books. She finds them in books she picks at second-hand bookstores sometimes: sprawling letters and rushed notes, always written with an affectionate hand. She thinks, with a sudden sort of need, that she’d like to write him one. 

“Of course. Come on.”

It’s ridiculously cold the moment they step outside and she wraps her arms around herself, shivering. Something warm drapes on her shoulders and she instinctively wraps it tighter around herself. It’s not until she’s nuzzled into the collar that she realises it’s Scott’s jacket. She should take it off, politely tell him she’s fine, give it back to him, because it’s his jacket and they’re not a couple and only boyfriends do that.

But it’s so warm and it smells like him, so she keeps it.

He keeps her steady when they walk up to her front door, takes the key from her hand to unlock it, lets her lean on him as she rubs her feet after kicking her heels off. She makes her way to her bedroom, not really caring if he’s there as she strips her dress off because there’s nothing underneath he hasn’t seen anyway.

She stumbles into her ensuite to root through the cabinet for her make-up remover wipes because she’s a little drunk but not enough to forget the way her skin had not forgiven her for forgetting to take her make-up off one night.

By the time she’s finished, there’s a glass of water on her bedside table, her covers turned down. She nearly trips again, not sure if it’s from the last drink she had or from how _caring_ he’s being. This isn’t what they are to each other. It’s not, it’s not.

He steadies her before she falls over completely, and it’s as she’s against his chest that she feels the rumble of his laugh. Is he laughing at her? She frowns. His palms are warm against the bare skin of her waist.

He leads her to her bed, and because he’s _right there,_ with his messy hair looking downright delectable, she leans up to kiss him. She wants him so badly. Will she ever not? He’s the first one to pull back, stopping the kiss with a gentle hand on her cheek.

She whines in protest, _does he not want her?_

“No, it’s not that I don’t want you, T. Believe me, I do. Just not tonight. Sleep the alcohol off, text me in the morning.” He tucks a piece of hair behind her ear, thumb at her cheekbone. He’s so close that she feels his breath on her lips when he whispers, “You’ve got me, T. For as long as you’ll have me.”

She swallows. “Will you...stay? Not for anything,” she hurries to add, “...just sleep.”

He gazes down at her for a while, long enough for her to think that he’s about to say no.

“Okay,” he nods. “I’ll stay.” He takes off his shirt and jeans, folds them up neatly on the foot of her bed instead of just leaving it on the floor (she got annoyed at him once about it and he hasn’t done it since) and lays down beside her.

She curls up into him without thinking—definitely without thinking because if she was thinking she’d realise that at some distant point in the near future this would be a bad idea—and he wraps himself around her, like the answer to a question she didn't know quite how long she'd been asking.

//

When she wakes up, he is the first thing she sees. She follows the curve of his closed eyes, like half-moons in the faint morning light. He looks so young when he’s sleeping, so familiar, and for a moment it’s like no time had passed since she met him on the playground.

Their limbs are still entwined, her leg thrown in between his. One of his hands holds hers over his chest, but his hold is light, palm half-open, like he’s just waiting for her to let go.

Her head aches with a throb, and she gingerly disentangles herself from him, careful not to wake him up. He stirs, mumbling a little, nosing into the space she’s just left, but doesn’t wake up. She pulls up the covers a little. She’s just about to brush his hair away from his forehead when she freezes, feeling like that gesture was too tender, grabs the glass of water instead and gulps it down. She finds the painkillers she keeps in her bathroom, pops two of them in her mouth, downs the rest of the water.

She piles her hair on top of her head, then turns the shower as hot as she can, watching the glass fog up. She scrubs herself from head to toe, her skin turning pink from how roughly she’s rubbing her loofah against it. She leans her head against the glass, closing her eyes.

It’s as she’s wrapping a towel around herself that there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

“Just come in, Scott. Door’s not locked.”

She’s taking her hair out of her bun, shaking the locks loose around her shoulders when he opens the door. She turns around. He’s still shirtless, clad only in his boxers, and just woken up and rumpled from her bed and she’s hit by a sudden wave of want.

“Do you mind if I borrow some toothpaste, Tess? And use your shower?” She flicks her gaze back up to his eyes, willing herself not to blush because she’d been checking him out.

She steps aside. “That’s fine.”

She reaches for her lotion as Scott reaches for her toothpaste. He’s about to squeeze some onto his index finger when she tells him, “There’s spare toothbrushes. Just grab one.”

He looks at her for a while. She doesn’t break his gaze. It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a toothbrush. “Are they in your cabinet?” He crouches down.

“Yeah, should be...towards the right side?”

“Yep, got it.” He rips the packaging open, tosses it in her trash can. He starts to brush his teeth. He uses her shower after and she finds a spare towel to hang on the rack for him.

She probably takes too long to put lotion on herself, but she lingers to watch Scott’s outline in the fogged-up glass. He switches off the water, steps out of the shower, and wraps the towel she’d laid out for him around his waist.

He makes no move to come closer but she can see how his eyes drag up the length of her exposed leg.

“See something you like?” she teases and he flushes.

He pads to her slowly, rivulets of water still tracking down his collarbone, his shoulders, his chest. He places his hands on either side of her on the counter. He sweeps her hair so it falls along her back, bends to drag his nose, then his lips against her exposed neck. She traps her moan.

“You smell so good, Tess.”

“Yeah? It’s—” her breath hitches as he grazes her skin with his teeth, “—cocoa butter. You can, _mmm,_ have some if you want,” she teases him.

“Maybe later,” she feels his smile against her neck. 

She whines his name when all he does is run his fingers up and down the sides of her waist.

“So impatient.” But he peels her towel off of her, like the petals of a flower unfurling, his hand cupping her breast. He nips her neck and she shudders.

He’s hard against her, and she grinds against him, liking how he growls when she does that. His hands spread her legs, map up her inner thighs, tease her pussy. He presses the heel of his hand against her clit, barely pushing his fingers past her entrance.

“Scott, want you now,” she whimpers once he doesn’t show any sign of going any further. She spreads her legs wider, one hand braced on the counter behind her, the other playing with her nipple.

“I’ve got you,” he soothes, fucking one, then two fingers in her. It feels good, filling her up, but she wants more. 

“No, want _you,_ ” she insists.

“Okay, okay,” he says with a gentle kiss on her shoulder. “I’ll be right back. I'll just grab a condom.”

She whines when he slips his fingers out of her, but he makes good of his promise and is back soon after, the soft thump of his towel on the bathroom floor. She sighs deeply when he crowds her against the bathroom counter again. He places his hands on her hips, turning her around, bending her over the bathroom counter.

_Oh._ Every time they’ve done this, she’s been careful to turn around each time, not wanting the vulnerability of facing him. She hadn’t realised he’d noticed.

He wraps an arm around her waist, presses his head against her cunt, and pushes into her.

He goes slow first, adjusts his angle until her lips fall apart with a sordid moan, and from that moment she doesn’t need to ask him what she wants as he fucks her hard with each thrust, like every other time she’s begged him too. She gives herself over to him, knowing that he’ll make her body sing. He teases her nipple in time with the rhythm of his movements, and she clenches around him. She digs her nails deeper into his forearms.

The bathroom mirror is blurred, and she raises her hand to wipe it, clears it enough to watch him in the glass. His eyes are squeezed shut, mouth parted in sin against her ear, her neck, her hair. He looks so raw and wanting, ravaging and wrecking her. She doesn’t want to look away.

“Tess, I—” he starts.

“What is it?”

He buries his head in her neck, the words mumbled into her skin. “Can’t stop thinking about the guy.”

“What guy?” She’s confused.

He chokes out the next words. “The guy from last night. That you were gonna go home with.”

A brief flicker of the man in question flits across her mind, but she doesn’t even clearly remember what he looks like.

“I was so. Fucking. Jealous.” He drops each word with each drag of his cock, like he can imprint himself on her in both words and touch. “And I know I shouldn’t be. Fuck, Tessa. I know that. This isn’t—this isn’t _that.”_ She doesn’t need to ask what ‘that’ is: a relationship, commitment, or, god forbid, love.

His breathing is ragged, and he could be sobbing, and she doesn’t know if what she’s feeling is the water dripping from him, the sweat from their fucking, or tears.

“Scott,” she says. 

He doesn’t look up, just brings his hand to where they’re joined. 

“Scott.” She demands.

He glances up at her, his chin on her shoulder. In the artificial bathroom light, she sees an apology written in his eyes like a page that’s hard to read because some of the words have been smudged.

She leans back against him, holds onto his hair. “I wasn’t gonna go home with him. I don’t want anyone else.” She runs her hand down to his cheek, and whispers, before she overthinks it, “Just you.”

A strangled moan leaves him, and his arm around her waist tightens like a vise, burying his face in the crook of her neck, trembling as he comes. Her fingertips trace the side of his face, over and over, the way she runs her them over and over beloved passages in favourite books.

She watches him take her hand, turn it over palm-up on the bathroom counter and with shaky fingers, places the tip of his finger where one of the lines of her palm begins. He starts to draw a line down.

It hits her what he’s trying to do. It’s something they used to do when they were kids—tracing letters on each other’s skin quick as a flash instead of talking.

It feels like too much, too much, too much.

She closes her hand. Whispers, instead, “Scott. Make me come.”

His fingers curl in themselves. He presses a kiss to the back of her neck at the top of her spine, spins her around, gets down on his knees. He hooks one of her legs over his shoulder and does exactly what she’s asked for.

//

“Scott?” She stands behind the information desk, dumbfounded.

“Hi, Tess.” He stands there awkwardly, holding the hand of his niece, Quinn.

“Hi Tessa!” the girl says, with a gap-toothed grin.

“Hey, Q. You ready for new books today?” The other times the girl drops by the library with her mom, she leaves with a stack of books almost as tall as she is. It’s endearing and reminds Tessa of what she was like when she was her age.

“Yep! Uncle Scott, let’s go!” She’s leading Scott away with all her strength.

“Okay, okay! I’m coming.” He gives her an awkward salute-wave, and lets himself be led by his niece.

(There’s a word in a dictionary on one of the shelves, page three hundred and thirteen, eight lines down, that describes his smile and the flutter of her heart: _fond._ )

“Tessa, we have a problem,” Kaitlyn comes to her frazzled and arms waving. “The volunteer who’s meant to be doing children’s storytime hasn’t come yet and it’s due to start, like, _now.”_

Tessa looks at the clock. They’ve got a couple of minutes. Normally, if there’s two people manning the information desk she could do it herself, but she’s the only one rostered on at the moment.

She turns to Kaitlyn. “Can you do it?” 

She shakes her head. “I’ve got the academic writing workshop at the same time.”

Scott and Quinn come to them, putting down a massive stack of books.

“Is everything alright?” Scott asks.

She pastes on a smile but Scott doesn’t stop looking concerned. “The volunteer who’s meant to be doing storytime hasn’t come yet, and we need to look for someone to do it.” She could probably find someone in one of the other areas who’s free—

“I could do it.”

She blinks at him.

“Yes! Yes, please. You’re a saviour,” Kaitlyn says. “Go on, Tess. Show him what he needs to do. I’ll man the desk for a couple of minutes.” Kaitlyn shoos her away with no time to protest. There’s meant to be an official protocol to follow prior to becoming a volunteer, forms to fill out and sign, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

She and Scott and Quinn walk over to the children’s area. Quinn sits down with her books and starts reading. There’s a plush blue chair in a corner that she tells him the volunteer usually sits when they read.

“These are the books that you can choose from. Usually we ask the volunteers to do nursery rhymes too? You don’t have to if you don’t want to.” She realises she hasn’t even thanked him yet. “Thank you so much for doing this. We hate to be a nuisance but you really did save us.”

“I’m happy to do it.” He takes a look at her expression. “Really, Tess.”

“Still. Thank you.” She glances towards Kaitlyn who’s talking to someone who looks like his head is about to be ripped off. “Let me know if you need anything. I’ll just go take care of...that.”

Scott chuckles. “I will. You go. I’ve got this.”

She takes a deep breath because she probably has to explain to another person that their requested book still hasn’t come in yet but that it will and that their patience would be very much appreciated.

She has a good view of the couch in the children’s corner from the desk. As the moms and their babies and toddlers come in, she watches him greet every single one, pulling faces until they giggle.

She watches him read. She watches him do the nursery rhymes complete with the hand actions. She hides her laugh when he forgets how to do them for ‘Itsy-bitsy spider’. She watches him as he’s obviously charmed all the moms of the kids, ignores the jab of something hot spiking through her as she watches one of them wrap their hand around his arm. She watches as he politely steps away, ignores the swooping feeling of victory in her stomach. 

She watches him greet each of the kids goodbye, with a high-five or a wave, and as one of the kids toddle over to him and hug his leg.

She watches him and thinks about the conditional mood: all the things that could’ve been, but aren't, and all the things that aren't yet, but could be. 

//

“Why did you come to my house that night?”

It's sometime in the middle of the night and they're laying side by side, like a pair of quotation marks, and the question leaves her out of the blue. It’s the kind of thing she hadn’t realised she’d been wondering for so long. 

(They don’t talk about how he’s started to spend the night after every tryst, she doesn’t think about how her hands search for him on the nights that he doesn’t, doesn’t think about how when she wakes up curled in the solid warmth of him, she forgets that this thing between them is branded with a certain kind of impermanence.)

“What night?” 

“The night we started...this.” She waves between them.

“Ah, right. That night. I don’t, I don’t know.” He sighs. “I just know my mom mentioned something about you having a break-up and I knew you must be hurting. And I—I don’t know. I thought you might need a friend.”

He's told her this already but she still feels like she's missing something. A book with pages missing. 

“Why did you never call?”

“What?”

“During my surgery. Why did you never call? Or visit? I knew you were home. You weren’t even an hour’s drive away...” Her voice trembles.

“Tessa,” he starts and she starts to cry. She turns on her side, away from him. 

“That’s when I needed a friend, Scott. That’s when I needed you.” The truth spills out from her like glass that shatters. She curls in on herself.

“Tessa,” his touch is gentle on her back. “Can I hold you?”

She thinks about saying no. But he makes no move to cage her in. He’s waiting. It’s her choice.

“Okay,” she whispers.

He wraps his arms around her and she clings tight to his forearms, heaving sobs leaving her.

“I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I fucked up, I know. I just didn’t know if I could. Call you or visit you, I mean. I didn’t know if you wanted to talk to me knowing I was happy and healthy and that you weren’t. I thought you didn’t want me to rub it in. But that was the wrong thing to do. I know that now. I’m sorry, Tess. I’m so sorry. I know that’s not enough. I know. I can’t fix what I did wrong back then, but Tess,” he holds her tighter, “I want to be your friend again. It’s not a blank slate because I don’t want to forget the mistakes I made back then. I don’t deserve your forgiveness. But I want to try, be better.”

She doesn't say anything back as they fall asleep. 

//

In the morning, with the sun, she turns over to face him. “I forgive you.” She whispers.

He shakes his head, but she says it again.

“I do. Scott, I do. It wasn’t just your fault. It was mine too. I could have picked up the phone as well. I forgive you. That’s my choice. You just need to choose to accept it.”

//

It’s a different morning, with the same sun, when he turns over to face her. “Okay. I—I accept it.”

She takes his hand and presses her lips to the centre of his palm. The first line of their couplet. 

The second is the crinkle of his eyes in the half-darkness and half-light of dawn. 

//

She likes that the nights are theirs.

The blanket of darkness is a comfort, a secret, cloaked in whispers and quiet, slivers of moonlight-kissed moments she’ll gather in a jar. She likes that she’s learned that she doesn't need to be able to see him to feel safe with him, that she doesn’t need to see exactly where his hands will touch her skin next to feel sure and certain as she gives her body to him.

They could’ve slept hours ago. He’s curled around her, his chest to her back, but as he lifts her leg and hooks it around his hip, opening her up to him, she’s not complaining that they’re not sleeping as his hand drags from her thigh to her hip to her cunt.

He ghosts his fingers over her folds, his touch so light that she barely feels it. His other hand is wrapped around her, cupping her breast, circling around her nipple. His mouth works the spot on her neck that she’s gotten really good at covering up because of how often he leaves marks.

(She studies them in the morning, presses her fingertip into the purpling bruises until she feels the tender ache. The thing is that she knows that if she asked him to, he’d stop leaving them. 

The other thing she knows is that she knows this, but she hasn’t asked him to stop.)

“Scott, please—” she gasps, writhing against his cock as he spreads her open, spreading her wetness and dragging the rough pads of his fingers across her clit. She digs her nails into his forearm, grips tighter on his hair, when he pushes his finger inside her, curling it just so and she keens.

“I’ll take care of you.” He rolls over and she can hear the rustle of a box as he grabs a condom.

“Scott—” she stops his hand. But then she realises what she’s just asked him for and realises that’s too much, too much.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, nothing. It’s fine.”

“Can you tell me?” he whispers.

“I just,” she squeezes her eyes shut, “for a moment I just had the thought that—I wanted to feel _all_ of you.”

He doesn’t say anything for a while. For a moment, she wonders if she’s irrevocably fucked up. It’s too much, too much.

He exhales, long and low. “The last time I got tested,” he says, “was six months ago, and I’m clean.” He splays his hand wide on her waist. “You’re the only one I’ve been with in that time, since we started this.”

“I’m on the pill and I got tested last month, I’m clean. I haven’t been with anyone other than you, either.” She replies in a daze, unbelieving that he’s actually considering it 

“Are you sure? That this is what you want.”

“Only if you want it,” she says weakly. 

She whimpers as he pushes his hand across her hip back to her pussy, parting her drenched folds and rubbing her clit in rough circles. “Tess,” he whispers “How could I not want you? All of you. Tight and wet and hot, squeezing around my cock. I want it. But,” he buries his face in the crook of her neck, “I don’t want this to be something you regret in the morning.”

Does he fear that, every time?

“I won’t. Can you trust me that I won’t?” She runs a finger up and down the length of his arm.

“Yes,” he breathes, pressing his length against her slick centre, dragging it through her wetness and she clenches around nothing every time he gets her clit. “Yes. I do.”

The satisfaction of him finally pushing into her is nothing short of exquisite. She closes her eyes, revelling in how hot and hard he is inside her, his rough, deep growl in her ear, the warmth of his breath making her shiver. He holds her open as he takes her, as she takes him, in measured thrusts that she feels deep, deep, _deep._

He moans her name in a broken litany _—Tessa, Tess, T—_ and keeps his hand over her clit with firm pressure so that she feels it with every push of his cock. He tells her how good she’s taking him, how pretty she is like his, how hard she’s making him and she shudders with every filthy word.

“Scott—I can’t take much more, fuck, I’m gonna—” She splinters around him, biting her lip hard as she comes.

He spills inside her as she squeezes around him, and all literary masterpieces must start out like this: messy and mistaken and still so fucking wonderful.

He’s the one that grabs a cloth from her ensuite after they finish, taking the time to make sure she’s clean. Their combined mess dripping down her thighs is a sordid thing, and she twitches with every pass of his hand even though he’s so gentle because of how sensitive she is.

It should terrify her how easily they slot together after. Not like puzzle pieces or locks and keys, the ones that fit with startling accuracy, certainty and inevitability. 

But as he fits his head into where her shoulder meets her neck, as she wriggles back until she finds a space where she’s comfortably rested against his chest, as she notices their hands have joined and she can’t remember who reached for whom first—she thinks of potter’s wheels and how clay is moulded not with lightning-quick, startling changes, but with the gentle imprints of hands and time.

//

“Tessa? Are you here?” 

She hears Jordan stomp down her hallway.

“Yep! I’m in the kitchen!” she yells back, trying not to lose her place in the recipe she had printed out. _What temperature does the oven need to be set at again...?_

“Oh my god, are you cooking? Do I need to call the fire department yet?”

“I’m not that bad!” She retorts. She’s not, not really. She’s no genius, and she’ll never understand how people just throw ingredients together and season to _taste,_ but she does fine with recipes. Mostly.

Her sister snorts, propping her hip against the kitchen island. Tessa doesn’t know why Jordan’s making fun of her; she knows they’re equally as skilled when it comes to cooking. And by skilled, she means the lack thereof.

“What are you making all this for, anyway?”

Tessa squints at the step that says how long the dish is meant to go into the oven for. “Scott’s coming for dinner,” she says, absentmindedly.

“Scott?!”

Shit.

“Um, yes.” Her cheeks are burning but she keeps her voice steady.

"Tessie." Jordan has her older-sister voice on and Tessa knows where the concern comes from. Jordan was the one who held her and dried her tears all throughout her injury and her failed surgery and giving up her dreams to pursue ballet and her heartache.

"We're—" _hooking up, fucking,_ a lot of options come to her head but it all feels too rough and jagged, "—becoming friends again."

Jordan raises an eyebrow. _With benefits?_ Tessa can basically hear her voice.

She gracefully sidesteps the unspoken question. 

"We've talked about what happened. Where he went wrong. Where I did. I don't know if we'll ever be best friends again," she says, wistful. "But I think that we can be friends."

Jordan nods. “You know Mom’s gonna have a field day, right? She and Alma are gonna start planning your wedding—”

“—wait, what? We’re not together!” Tessa yelps, jumping as the oven dings, telling her it’s been preheated at the right temperature. She turns around and bends down, opening the oven door and sliding the tray in. She closes it and stands back up, facing her sister. “He’s—he’s just a rebound!”

She looks up just in time to see Jordan’s triumphant smirk at getting her to admit the true nature of her and Scott’s—thing.

_He’s just a rebound,_ she thinks as Jordan lets her change the topic, as she goes to her closet to find the dress that Jordan wanted to borrow for a work event.

_He’s just a rebound,_ she thinks as Jordan hugs her goodbye, with a final reminder to take care of herself, and that she’s always there for her if she needs it.

_He’s just a rebound,_ she thinks, even though she knows her rebounds last a night or two and never as many turns of the moon as Scott has now slept in her bed.

_He’s just a rebound,_ she thinks as Scott’s mouth drops open in an ‘o’ as he sees what she’s made for him, the way he smiles like light splintering through creaks in an open door and it floods her with warmth when he looks at her.

She chases that same warmth when she pushes him onto her bed the second they enter her bedroom, dropping to her knees in front of him, tugging his clothes off roughly, taking him in her mouth.

“Fuck, Tess,” he breathes, his hand buried in her tresses, holding it as firmly as she likes. “I love your mouth, but let me—” he stutters as she drags the tip of her tongue up his cock, swirling it around his head, “—let me take care of you first.”

She pumps him with her hand as she releases him from her mouth, catching her breath and shaking her head. If she makes him come, would he smile for her like that again? She wants it with a hazy sort of desperation.

She wraps her lips around him again. Between the taste of him, his firm hold on her hair, and the broken, pleading sounds that leave him as she works him with her mouth, she’s wet and aching. She slips her hand under her leggings to touch herself, moaning around him as she circles her clit.

Scott’s hips stutter. He groans her name like it’s a broken thing. “Are you making yourself feel good, pretty girl?” he murmurs low and she whines.

She pushes two fingers in her, wishing they were his, wishing it was him. She moans around his length, drawing back up to suck at his head.

His thumb grazes her cheek. “So good for me,” he groans. “Your mouth is— _fuck_ ,” he hisses, when she takes him in deeper again until he hits the back of her throat, “you’re fucking perfect, _you don’t know what you do to me_.”

She’d fully intended to make sure he comes first, but as he runs his mouth with filth and praise and she drags the length of her finger against her swollen clit, she comes with the sound of his voice in her ears.

As she cries out, he hauls her up, his cock slipping from her mouth. She falls on top of him, and his mouth finds hers as he sneaks his hands up her shirt. She sits up to take it off, getting off his lap to take off her leggings and underwear. He’s taking off his shirt as she stands in front of him. His hands mould to her waist, her hips, and his warm breath hitting her stomach makes her shiver. She places her hand on the side of his face, raking back his sweaty hair.

He gently turns her around, this small gesture that feels so big. She feels something trapped and fluttering in her chest. She sinks down on him and settles against his chest with a sigh, leaning her head on his shoulder. She rests her fingertips on the line of his jaw.

“Are you gonna make me do all the work?” he murmurs as his strong hands move her.

“Maybe,” she teases.

He huffs, lightly drawing a line on her sternum.

“Scott!” she gasps, ticklish, a laugh falling from her lips.

It’s like her laugh is the imperative, the tug and the word that makes him smile. _Oh._ That’s what she’s been chasing.

It’s slower this time. He laughs and it wraps around her, as steady and soothing as his arms. She leans to the side a little, turning her head as much as she can so she can watch him. His hands become more firm, more insistent, and he coaxes her over the edge. She keeps her eyes open as she comes. She keeps her eyes open as he follows her, her name mouthed into her shoulder.

She stays in the moment after. She keeps her eyes open and she watches him and she stays. And he looks at her, and touches his lips to hers, but it doesn’t feel like a kiss. It feels like a million words and none at all, and she doesn’t know what they are but she knows this: she can keep promises, she can keep secrets, she can keep memories. He is all three. But she doesn’t know if she can keep him.

//

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

He still looks uncertain, and that’s fine. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be Scott, and she wouldn’t trust him. 

(She trusts him. It dawns on her and it’s an important revelation but it sinks and seeps into her, so fluidly, because it’s an easy thing to accept.)

“You want me to tie you up. With my clothes?”

“Yes. Yes, please.” She’s thought about it in the abstract, late at night, when she’s touching herself. But she’s never gotten around to actually doing this with a partner.

“You really want this?” He asks, low. He has his jeans in his hands and it’s distracting how he’s moving fingers up and down the fabric.

She bites her bottom lip and nods.

“Okay. Okay, I’m in. But I’m gonna need to,” he reaches over to grab his phone, “look up how to do this.”

She laughs. “You’re gonna google it?”

“Don’t make fun of me, T," he shakes his head as he props his phone up against the lamp on her bedside table. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

He takes off her bra and panties, savouring the way his eyes grow dark with want as he reveals all of her. Will she ever stop wanting him? (She has to, she has to, she has to. There’s a day when that day will be the last day she’ll have him like this, but today’s not that day.) He leans over her as she lays back. She brings her wrists closer to her headboard. “Not even if I want it to a little?”

He swears, hands fumbling. “You’re gonna kill me.”

“But wouldn’t your demise be so sweet?” she teases him. He’s squinting at his screen as he loops the length of the leg around her wrists. He does it carefully, the corner of his lip tucked between his teeth.

His solid weight and the smell of sweat and soap and something purely him is intoxicating as he slowly makes sure she’s bound. She won’t lie, in the times she’s thought about this before, her breath would catch and her toes would curl at the thought of someone treating her a little too rough and a little too hard, craving the loss of control.

Scott’s neither of those things right now. He’s tying her up firmly, for sure—when she tests her binds she can’t get free and she gets wetter at the realisation—but he’s all gentleness as he does so. She would have assumed that this meant that reality isn’t living up to her fantasies but as she watches him bite his lower lip, the frown on his brow that deepens that shows his entire focus is on her, her breath catches and her toes curl anyway.

“Good? Not too tight?” He checks in after he’s finished. He slips two fingers under the fabric, checking that it’s safely tied. He touches her gently just below her wrists, down her arms, the dip of her waist. She hums in agreement. “What about safewords? Do you usually just say yellow to pause, red to stop?”

“That can work. I’ve never,” she tries to shrug, “I’ve never done this before.”

“Never?”

She shakes her head.

He gazes at her, and she wonders if he’s going to say something. He sits back. “Then I gotta make sure this is good for you then.” He skims his fingers down the side of her face. “Do you need, like a blindfold or something?” He remembers this about her, without fail, how she doesn’t like to be seeing him.

(It doesn’t feel quite right to say it so black and white like that. It’s not that she doesn’t want to watch him when he’s in her bed. She finds herself doing it more often than not now, even if her neck aches a little after because of how long she keeps her head turned for.)

“Can you use your shirt?” she asks, softly.

“Yeah. Yeah, I can do that.” He takes it from where it’s been discarded on her bed and leans over her again. “This okay?” He stretches the fabric out and carefully covers her eyes, making sure her nose isn’t covered. He cradles her head, helping her lift it up a little so he can tie it behind her head.

She focuses on his touch. He glides the flat of his palm down her neck, her shoulder, her waist, up her stomach. He cups her breast, circles slowly inward but moves away again. She whimpers, arching her back. She strains against her ties.

She feels his fucking smirk against her skin. He runs his lips, his tongue, over her and she never knows where he’s going to touch her next. It’s torturous. It’s glorious.

“Spread your legs for me,” he whispers, all husk and growl. He has his hands on the outside of her thighs but makes no move to move them apart for her. It’s all her choice, she thinks deliriously, it’s all hers. She opens herself. For him, for her. She must make a lewd, desperate picture all tied up and spread open like this.

“You’re exquisite,” he breathes. An exhale that she barely hears (but she must, but she does) because his mouth, his hands, _he_ is on her. He drops chaste kisses and open presses of his mouth from her ankle, up her legs, up her thighs, bypassing her pussy to bite at her hip. He hovers over her stomach, his warm breath teasing her as his thumbs sweep back and forth on the sensitive skin of her inner thighs.

“Scott, please,” she lifts her hips off the bed. Scott presses down on her lower abdomen and she whines, surely she must be drenched. “Please, just—I _need_ you.”

She bends her knees, opening herself wider for him, surely he can see what he does to her, surely he can see how wet she is, surely he can see how much she craves, wants, needs—

She cries out as he parts her with his tongue, opening his mouth wide and sucking. 

“Is that what you wanted?” he says. She can’t see anything but she’s sure of the exact smirk he’s giving her. 

She’s about to snap at him but he places his mouth on her cunt again, holds her open with his thumbs as he licks and sucks and gives and retreats and teases. The bedsprings creak and she wonders if he’s rutting into her bed, if having her like this drives him as wild as he does for her. She wants to close her thighs around his head but he keeps them firmly down. She’s utterly vulnerable, and yet she’s never felt safer.

In the dark, in her blindness, time is but a construct. 

There’s a linguistics class whose notes she’s long thrown away but she remembers a lecture on how different languages talk about time: those that talk in lengths and those that speak in space, those that have too many tenses and those that have none at all. 

Here, their language is touch, his words are the press of his fingertips and the wet of his mouth, her answer is her body unfurling. And time—time is theirs.

When she comes, the world shrinks to a pinpoint and then expands in the next breath.

_Tessa, Tessa—fuck, did I hurt you?_ She thinks she hears him speak. Scott undoes his knots, his touch like water. Her wrists are a little chafed and arms and shoulders ache a little but it’s been so, so good. She blindly reaches for him once she’s untied, wrapping her arms around his neck like a newborn deer, all ungainly limbs. He catches her even as she clumsily clambers onto him. He takes off her blindfold. His fingers weave into her hair.

“I’m so sorry,” is the first thing she clearly hears.

“What for?”

“Tess, you’re crying.” He touches the corner of her eyes and they come back damp.

“Oh. I hadn’t realised.” She smiles. “It’s not, it’s not bad. Promise. It was just, you were just—overwhelming. The feeling, I mean. It was good,” she looks down and back up at him, “really good.”

She lives surrounded by books and words, so there’s probably a better word for it. But from the way he looks at her, it’s enough.

“Do you need anything?” he murmurs.

She shakes her head, and holds on tighter. _Just hold me, please,_ she thinks, not brave enough to say the words out loud.

“What about you?” she asks, remembering. “You’ve gotten me off, I could—”

“No need,” he laughs.

“What do you mean?”

“I already came,” he laughs, short and sharp, unbelieving, “in my boxers. Like a fucking teenager.”

“Really?” She feels weirdly giddy.

“Yeah,” his hand trails up and down the divot of her spine. “The sounds you make…” he trails off, shrugs one shoulder. “I couldn’t help it. You’re not gonna let me forget this, eh?”

“Well…”

He drags his thumbnail up her sternum and she bats his hand away, shivering because it tickles. “Scott!”

It seems fair, anyway, because there’s a lot of things about him she’s not going to forget, bits and pieces of him tucked in her that will fall out and flutter like photographs taken too long ago. But she’ll see them, and she’ll remember.

//

From her spot in her reading nook with her favourite book, she can hear where Scott’s fiddling with her broken washing machine. When she’d complained about it being broken a few nights ago, he’d offered to have a look at it. It was so offhand and casual that it took her by surprise. Maybe, even after they end this thing they’ve got going between them, she can still keep him. As her friend.

There’s a sound of something dropping and she hears him swear and she hides her smile even though he’s not there to see it.

(She doesn’t need to mention that the sound of the word _fuck_ leaving his mouth sparks something hot in her lower belly, her toes curling. He can deal with that later.)

It’s a little while later that she can hear him singing something, some chart-topper that was on the radio that morning. It feels like she’s hearing a secret, like she’s hearing an intimate moment, Scott with his guard totally down.

It feels like the last moment before the sun goes down—something fleeting and precious and just out of reach. And yet she listens, waiting, wanting, for the next time it’ll come again, knowing it will warm her head to toe if or when it does.

She’s still curled up with her book when he drops down on the floor in front of her couch. He leans his head back, bumping her leg. She doesn’t take her eyes off the book when she threads her hand through his hair.

“It’s all done?”

“Yep, all fixed. You’re lucky you’ve got me, T,” he teases.

(She is, she knows, but she’s not admitting that.)

Scott taps the cover of her book. “What’s the book?”

“ _A Gentleman in Moscow._ ” She gives it to him when he reaches for it. He keeps his index finger tucked between the pages to mark where she is as he skims through the book.

“Can I read to you?” he asks.

“Am I one of the kids you read to now?” He’s become a regular volunteer since the first time. He has time to spare around his physio clients, he said.

“You’re almost as cute.” He grins at her upside down. He goes back to the place she had left off and begins.

_“Suddenly, at 4:45 in the afternoon, wheeling before the Count was the five-starred constellation of Delphinus. If one drew a line with one’s finger through its two lowest stars and followed its trajectory across the heavens, one would reach Aquila, the Eagle; while if one drew a line through its uppermost stars, one would reach Pegasus, Bellerophon’s flying stallion; and if one drew a line in the opposite direction, one would reach what appeared to be a brand-new star—a sun that may have flared out a thousand years ago, but the light of which had just reached the Northern Hemisphere in order to provide guidance to weary travelers, sojourners, and adventurers for another millennia to come…”_

She leans back on the chaise, keeps her hand running softly over and over his hair. She listens to him read about Count Rostov making constellations out of the freckles on his lover Anna’s back and thinks back to how Scott was doing the exact same thing this morning.

She feels something shift in her chest: a merciless drop, an enjambment.

//

She likes that the mornings are theirs.

The fact that Scott’s a good cook would be really, really annoying if he wasn’t cooking for her, but as he’s making her breakfast there’s not much to complain about. He’s making them pancakes because she’s finally stocked her kitchen with flour and eggs and butter.

_You need, you know, like actual food,_ he had said the first morning after looking in her pantry, ducking as she was about to flick a dish towel at him.

She sits perched on her kitchen counter, in just his button-down, watching him as he tries to Gordon-Ramsey his way around her kitchen.

He tries to flip a pancake and somewhat succeeds. It lands halfway in the frying pan. “Look at that!”

“Eh, could be better.” She gets batter on her nose for that, and she wipes it away with the back of her hand.

He treats the spatula like it’s a microphone, warbling his slightly off-key renditions of the latest pop songs with all his lungs. “Wouldn’t you say I’m a solid 10 out of 10 for my singing, T?” He winks.

“I think you’re more of a solid 7,” she teases. He protests, sliding the pancakes from the frying pan to the waiting plate. She giggles and he grins at her, taking up the spatula again.

He sings his way over to her with the plate of pancakes in his other hand. He sets it down on the counter beside her as he stands between her open legs. She locks her ankles around his lower back.

It’s there as she touches his lips that are curved into her favourite smile, that she realises. _Oh._

“Scott.”

He pauses. “Yeah?”

She takes his hand, turns it over palm-side up. She draws a line down his palm. His breathing hitches. She writes slowly, carefully, gently. She doesn’t want him to misunderstand.

There are lines, that make up words, that make up sentences, that make meaning.

_I,_ she trembles. 

It’s been years now, since the last time they’ve done this, and they’ve now fucked more times than she can count but this is the most vulnerable she’s ever felt in front of him. She thinks of languages you haven’t spoken in a really long time, how hard it is to shape your tongue around foreign sounds that were once familiar.

_T-H-I-N-K_

_I-M_

It’s been years now, since the last time she’s done this and she thinks of first languages and how there’s no feeling that quite matches the feeling of home.

_F-A-L-L-I-N-G_

_I-N_

It’s been years but he knows what she’s writing now, surely? He could close his palm, like she did that morning in her bathroom when it was him who tried to do this. But it stays open, waiting.

_L-O-V-E_

It’s a funny word, isn’t it? She thinks idly and with a rapidly beating heart. Only four letters and it can hold universes, and yet it still fits on the width of his palm.

His own breathing stutters and she squeezes her eyes shut. But she opens them again.

_W-I-T-H,_ she’s only got three letters to go and she’s, so, so, so fucking scared.

_Y-O-U_

She looks up at him, her heart pounding in her chest. 

“Tess,” he breathes. _“Tess.”_ He presses his forehead to hers.

“I—I just wanted to let you know. I know this isn’t what you signed up for so I understand if…” she trails off, a sudden ache in her throat. He hasn’t interrupted her but he hasn’t gone away either. His palm still rests on her hands like a blank page.

“I fucked up when we were younger, Tess. I hurt you, and I didn’t apologise, didn’t try to fix my mistakes. I should have, and I’m sorry. You’ve given me your forgiveness, and I’ll always be grateful for that but I’m never going to stop being sorry, okay?”

She tries to protest but he shakes her head, taking her hand and kissing her knuckles.

“I did, T. And I wish I’d been braver earlier. I wish I called you back then. I wish that the first time I saw you after months of radio silence, I apologised. I wish that in the years in between then and now, I tried to reach out first. I wish it didn’t take hearing about your break-up through my mom that I drove down to your house to see if you were okay. I was so fucking terrified, you know that? I knocked on your door like I was still your best friend when I knew that was the last thing I was. But I knew from seeing you with him that you loved him and that you would be hurting. And somehow I got it in my head that I would be a person that could help you.”

“And all I asked you for sex,” she says, horrified.

He laughs, “Yes. But you’re giving me more. You’re giving me your heart, T. Which is fair, because you already have mine.”

She surges forward to kiss him.

( _I love you,_ he says into her mouth, and he’ll write that on her skin in an eternity of places, cherished constellations on the expanse of her body.)

He kisses her back just as hard. She wraps her legs around him as he picks her up and takes her to her bedroom. He’s so gentle when he places her on her bed. She cups his face as he settles over her, thumbs skimming his tears. It’s then that she realises she’s crying too.

He unbuttons the shirt that she’s wearing, slipping it off her shoulders. He kneels up to get rid of his sweatpants and boxers, shoving them down his legs. He’s about to start folding their clothes neatly and she loves that he remembers but she pulls him over her because she’d much rather just have him.

“Scott,” she moans, after minutes and minutes of kissing, holding him as close to her as she can, like she can stitch them together like the pages of books. He slips his fingers between her thighs, opening her up for him. He presses his forehead to hers, his mouth just out of reach, their breaths mingling. She arches her back as he gets his thumb on her clit, when he presses that place inside her that makes her keen. “Want you inside me, now.”

“I’ve got you,” he whispers.

It’s the first time she’s looking in his eyes as he enters her, the first time she can clearly watch his face screw up as he pants when he’s fully inside her. He’s gorgeous like this, uninhibited and fuckable and looking at her like she’s all he wants.

Her windows are open and the blinds are drawn, so sunlight spills all over him. After having him for so long only in the dark, there’s something sweet about loving him in the light.

It’s slow and reverential and— _exquisite, You’re so exquisite, Tess—_ and it’s everything she’s never let it be, and she learns why. Being with Scott like this has the capacity to shatter her into a million pieces.

But not when she’s sure of the words they’ve whispered between them.

When they make love, it’s in the present continuous: opening and kissing and giving, moaning and laughing and gazing, touching and protecting and treasuring, and always loving, loving, loving.

//

On the next evening he comes over, he hands her a bag marked with _Indigo_ on the outside. It’s from her favourite bookstore.

“For me?”

“Yeah, I wanted to get you something. I remember you saying you’ve been meaning to read that one, and I was lucky that one of the ladies at the store was willing to help me find it. I told her that I wanted to get it for my girlfriend.”

He says the last word softly. He must still be getting used to it, like she is. It feels like the spine of the books you haven’t read yet but with time become well-worn and well-loved. They can take their time.

She reaches into the bag and takes the book out. _The Night Circus._ She had mentioned it once that she’d been meaning to buy a copy, and she adores that he remembered.

“Thank you,” she leans up to kiss him, holding the book in her hands with awe. She turns to the first page and finds a message from him, earnestly written in his boyish scrawl.

She traces his handwriting and hopes, decades and decades and decades from now, that someone else will pick this book up at a second-hand bookshop and think, _Oh, this is a girl who was truly loved._

She’s still reading the book a few evenings later when they’re both settled on her couch and she’s curled up against him.

She looks up for a moment to watch his profile as he’s watching highlights from the last hockey game on her TV. She adores him like this, in a mundane moment, that if she’s lucky enough she’ll get a million more of.

(It’s a bit too early to think of forever, but—they’ve got time.)

“What is it?” Scott asks softly when he notices her watching him, muting the TV. He places his hand on her knee, thumb sweeping back and forth.

“Nothing, I just—love you,” she whispers. She takes his hand, links their fingers together. “Scott?”

“Yeah?”

“I want this. I want us,” she confesses, starting with the truths she knows. “But I know,” her voice trembles but she keeps on going, “that there’s a part of me that’s going to be scared that you’ll leave me. Because I know what it's like to watch you walk away and never come back. And that’s something I know I have to work on.”

His heart breaks in his eyes. She doesn’t want him to feel like she doubts him. She’s trusting him that she can tell him this, but a part of her is also so scared that her stupid feelings and overthinking will wreck what they have when they’ve barely begun. 

But he takes her hand, holds it tight. He’s still here. That’s what matters. “Can you—can you tell me when you’re feeling that way? So I can reassure you. So I can hold you. I know,” he exhales, leaning back on the couch, “that I’ll have my own doubts too. I know that there will be times when I feel like I don’t deserve you.”

She never wants him to feel like that. “Can you tell me?” she cradles his cheek. “When you feel that way? So I can remind you all the reasons that you’re so good to me.”

“Okay,” he places his hand over hers, then changes the way he’s sitting so he can envelop her in his arms. They’re pressed forehead to forehead and chest to chest and heart to heart and still she wants to be closer. He breathes deeply and she breathes with him, the soft of his shift clutched in her hands. “Okay, I will. I promise.”

“It won’t be perfect,” she murmurs into his neck but it’s not a warning. It’s an inevitability and it’s their choice, their choice to stay, to forgive, to grow with each other.

“I know. But I don’t want it to be. I just want to be with you.”

When she kisses him, it’s hard because she can’t stop herself from smiling.

He takes the closed book from her hands, opens it. She curls up again against his shoulder. She understands why the kids he speaks to adore him so. He’s got the best voice, low and soothing.

_“I have been surrounded by love letters you two have built each other for years, encased in tents…”_

She listens to him read and she loves him in the infinitive: in the way he can become her past, her present and her future, all at once.

**Author's Note:**

> (more than) a few notes:  
>   
> \+ the idea for this fic came from this [interview](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbikKXYSZMI&) with country singer Thomas Rhett and this [podcast](https://podtail.com/en/podcast/get-real-w-caroline-hobby/lauren-akins-life-love-with-thomas-rhett-since-fir/) of his wife, Lara Akins – it’s not an exact replica of their love story but it was the genesis of what this fic ended up being.  
>   
> \+ also a shoutout to one of my French teachers in uni who said something poetic and deep about the conditional mood (I had to take a moment during our zoom class, haha) that led to the grammatical tenses and moods motif of this fic.  
>   
> \+ that being said, apologies for all inaccuracies with grammatical terms. (especially the l’imparfait. I believe it technically encompasses the habitual past in addition to the past continuous in English? but I skimmed over that nuance.)  
>   
> \+ definitely rec both _A Gentlemen in Moscow_ and _The Night Circus_! both books have utterly gorgeous prose.  
>   
> \+ and if you made it to the end, thank you! I love you, come yell at me on [tumblr](https://echoesofstardust.tumblr.com/) or [twitter](https://twitter.com/stardust_echoes), and I hope you have a wonderful day <3


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